As a result of the Blob, many of the kelp forests along the coast from California to Oregon have vanished, done in by warming and the army of purple sea urchins, which thrive in a hotter world. “If a two-hundred-mile-long stretch of forest in the California mountains suddenly died, people would be shocked and outraged,” Laura Rogers-Bennett, a marine scientist with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, told me when I visited her at the Bodega Marine Lab a few days after our dive. “We’re talking about the collapse of an entire ecosystem. But because it happened in the ocean, nobody
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